Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:39:17 +0000 (UTC) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: unsigned char portability Message-ID: <a3cdi5$19e5$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de> References: <F74DyNdauuNi4kysRWz00010abe@hotmail.com>
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June Carey <carey_june@hotmail.com> wrote: > I have a question I was hoping someone could answer. > Does the "unsigned char" C type have any machine architecture portability > problems ? For one thing, you don't know its size. I'm told there are C implementations on DSPs and such that have 32-bit chars, simply because those processors don't support other datasizes or byte addressing. Now whether you care about portability to such platforms is a different matter. As far as FreeBSD is concerned, i.e. any platform FreeBSD is likely to be ported to, you can assume an unsigned char to refer to an unsigned 8-bit integer. > I rather suspect the answer is NO, since I seem to recall that "The Design > and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" book mentions that > bytes/octets are network portable in their native bit-ordering. Just like memory, networks tend to treat the octet as the atomic unit of transmission. Of course you need to worry about bit-ordering any time you serialize an octet, but that is usually handled in hardware. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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